Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
Retail has never existed in a vacuum.
This interdisciplinary volume explores how English commercial, co-operative and charity retailing were shaped by and in turn influenced their social and political environments, from the local and the global, between the late-nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries.
Historians, sociologists, archivists and heritage professionals engage with current debates on the rise of modern business and the decline of the high street, class and credit, professionalisation in the voluntary sector, migration and the end of empire.
This will be a key resource to better understand retail and community in an era defined by social change, shedding new light on the enduring centrality of community relationships to modern retailers.
We praise those people who do things for others. But the symbolic power of giving means individuals can take advantage of the glow of ‘goodness’ that charity provides.
This book analyses the reality of how charity operates in the social world; how the personal benefits of giving and volunteering are vital for getting charitable acts to happen; how the altruism associated with gifts isn’t always what it seems; how charity misbehaviour or bad management gets overlooked; and how charity symbols are weaponised against those who don’t participate.
Drawing on original data and a novel application of the sociology of Bourdieu, this book examines a wide range of examples from culture, politics and society to provide an entertaining critique of how contemporary charity works.
